Marie-Louise Gay, 1952-

	Lizzy's Lion. Written by Dennis Lee. Illustrated by Marie-Louise Gay. Toronto: Stoddart, 1993, c1984.
Reproduced by permission of Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited.

Original illustration created for Lizzy's Lion: watercolour and gesso mix, coloured pencil and Ecoline ink.

Rough sketch for Lizzy's Lion.

	Storyboard for Lizzy's Lion.
In the planning stages, thumbnail sketches help the illustrator to match her illustrations with the story and to plot her illustrations page by page. Illustrations: Courtesy of Marie Louise Gay

"Violence doesn't bother me in children's books, but I realized that, for four double page spreads, there was a lion eating a robber. That's a big part of the book. ‘What am I going to do?' I started the whole book again and said, ‘How could I put this into one or two pages?' There was no way. You can't have a page with five stanzas and then a page with no text. I couldn't draw four pages of blood and guts. And I don't think that's the point. The point is that the lion eats the robber and the child is the strong person in the book. She knows the word, the lion's secret name. So, how to do it? What I did was to dress the robber in very distinctive clothes and the lion would rip them off. In the last fight image, the lion is holding the robber by the leg and the robber's head is cut off by the page. Now, who knows? Maybe the head had been bitten off, but it's left to the imagination. Two pages later, you have Lizzy looking at the room, and there are shredded clothes scattered all over the place and the robber's glove is hanging out of the lion's mouth. It is clear that the lion has devoured the robber, but the violence has never been graphically detailed."